Arcane Topics in Economics and Philosophy, Interspersed with Various Distractions

July 21, 2009

Coherentism

Joyless Moralist has a certain advantage in our debates, because while she seems to understand my philosophy fairly well, I have never been able to understand hers. As a result, I probably misrepresent it, and perhaps I will be doing so again when I say that the following passage called into my mind the word "coherentism." Coherentism is a school of epistemology according to which a belief can be considered justified/knowledge if it "coheres with"-- a large system of beliefs, even if none of the beliefs is justified. Thus JM writes:

Obviously there have been very systematic and high-level discussions going on in periods when pretty much nobody was interested in Cartesian-type "rigor." It's clearly possible. And that shouldn't surprise us, because in point of fact we will find a large number of points of agreement with those we might wish to convince, and these become starting points. Not many people like arguing about religion as much as me, and I certainly have no commitment to a Cartesian view of knowledge, but this has never proved an obstacle in getting a discussion off the ground, with Muslims, Orthodox, atheists, adherents to Eastern religion or anyone else... I have never met anyone "unlucky" enough not to reach the conclusion that there is order in the world, or that other minds exist. Nobody has ever complained, in a debate, that I was unfairly "imposing" such beliefs on them; you need a good amount of fairly perverse philosophical education to even worry about things like that.

JM suggests that it is not necessary, in Cartesian fashion, to dig down to the foundations of knowledge and see which beliefs are justified, so to speak, from the ground up. Instead, we can find "points of agreement" with our interlocutors and use those as "starting places." Of course, one may ask the question, do we really know that we are right about the points of agreement, or might they rather represent mistakes which we happen to have in common? But JM seems to think it requires a "perverse philosophical education" to ask such questions too persistently.

Even if we accept that, however, there's another problem. Suppose A, who thinks that B, is trying to persuade C, who believes that D, (A and C are persons; B and D, propositions) to come over to his way of thinking. A discovers that he and C share a common belief that E, and manages to construct a proof that if E, then B. If C wishes to have coherent beliefs, he then has two choices: he might accept B, or he might abandon E. We have no reason, so far, to say which he ought to do. More generally, a coherentist epistemology seems ab initio to deprive us of any grounds for choosing one coherent belief-system rather than another.

A might proceed to find common beliefs F, G, and H from which he can prove that B (or that E), but C may abandon these beliefs as well in preference to abandoning D. It would seem that the only way to make B really compelling is to find some belief X that is somehow indubitable, and to use that as a foundation for knowledge. For Descartes, X is "I think therefore I am." JM seems to doubt even that, or at least to say the phrase can mean nothing unless we know what "I" and "am" are. It is difficult for me not to regard these concepts as at bottom self-evident, even if exploration beyond basic intuition might be possible and rewarding. However, if JM is right, one response would be to look for some other truth that is really foundational. JM seems not to want to do that, but, in rejecting the foundationalist approach to knowledge, I do not how she escapes the general problems with coherentism.

I should say that the two instances of shared beliefs she mentions-- order and other minds-- seem to me very strange and special cases of beliefs that, to put a hard matter in an inadequate way, can be doubted, as a mental gesture, but will rarely if ever really be disbelieved. I agree that she is unlikely to ever meet anyone who does not believe those two, though the beliefs are also so ineffable that as soon as one attempts to imply them agreement will be imperilled. My objections are to coherentism generally. The particular applications of it JM has in mind may be sound, but for reasons that do not apply in general.

Comments

Am I a coherentist? I've read a bit of the literature on it, but to be honest, I've never felt that the view was sufficiently well developed to make it at all clear what exactly it entails. As a practical matter, both foundationalism and coherentism seem to pick up on certain features of our intellectual development that I can recognize. I don't think either view has been made sufficiently clear for me to say whether I subscribe to it or not. Though I would at least say that surely any coherentist view that anyone seriously adopted would allow for a certain amount of fluidity, so that problems like the one you describe above would be, at the least, diminished. Nobody thinks that we have to adopt a full and non-negotiable set of beliefs about everything from the moment we have our first glimmer of consciousness or rationality.

I *do* certainly believe that epistemology can't effectively be separated from metaphysics. Any coherent epistemological view will entail substantial metaphysical claims as well; we can't "settle" the epistemology questions first, independent of metaphysics, and then move on to the latter. If you want to call me a coherentist on the basis of that belief, then fine.